Reading Matters

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

"It's not just a bunch of words," says U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright. "Language has purpose," The 1957 Davidson graduate will be the star of "An Evening with Charles Wright" at 8 p.m. on Thursday in Duke Family Performance Hall on the Davidson College campus.
Wright chose Davidson as an undergraduate because his parents wanted him to have a proper education. He majored in history, but his greatest desire was to write fiction. One thing he learned at Davidson was that he was not a storyteller -- a shock for the Tennessee-born student.

He gave up on the idea of writing fiction, but later, in Italy, Wright happened on the poems of Ezra Pound, and, as he told the Paris Review, "I discovered a form that seemed suited to my mental and emotional inclinations -- the lyric poem, a form that seemed suited to my mental and emotional inclinations -- the lyric poem, a form, or subgenre, I guess, that didn't depend on a narrative structure, but on an imagistic one, an associational one."

The author of 20 books, Wright has won every prize awarded to poets, including the Pulitzer Prize. He is retired from the University of Virginia where he taught English literature and creative writing.

The reading is free and open to the public. However, tickets are required. They are available from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Alvarez College Union ticket office. They are also available for $3 by calling the ticket office (704-894-2135) or by reserving online.

The Body Tourist is the Atlanta native's personal journey into and out of anorexia. One reviewer calls it "the biography of an illness as stubborn as the woman determined to kill it.."

Another reviewer says Shavin can "write with both hands."

You can hear the author read and talk about her book at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books.

A former therapist, Shavin now makes her living as certified life coach and as an artist and a writer. Since 2002, she has been a monthly columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and she is editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation newspaper, the Shofar.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

On Friday, at 5:30 p.m., at Park Road Books, Dan Fesperman, a Charlotte native and a 1972 graduate of Olympic High School, will talk about his new thriller -- his ninth -- called "Unmanned" (Knopf, $26.95).

A former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Fesperman draws his plots from his own international assignments to Pakistan, Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Reviewing the novel for the Wall Street Journal, Howard Gordon says:

Dan Fesperman's excellent and timely ninth thriller, Unmanned, "...explores the ethical conundrums of the most potent new weapon in the American arsenal: the unmanned aerial drone. Watching our enemy from the sky is one thing, but what if those same eyes are looking down at us? And who is watching the watchers? Unmanned is a smart and thoughtful exploration of the unintended consequences of waging war by remote control."

Monday, February 16, 2015

I didn't know the poet Philip Levine. I never met him, and I never heard him read, except on the Bill Moyers show in 2013 on TV.
But I loved him from afar.
Called the working man's poet, Levine died Saturday of pancreatic and liver cancer in Fresno, Calif. He was 87.
Born in 1928 in Detroit to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine grew up in the midst of the Great Depression. His heroes were the ordinary folks who worked at hopeless jobs simply to stave off poverty. Noted for his interest in the grim reality of the blue-collar worker, Levine resolved "to find a voice for the voiceless" while working from age 13 in the auto plants of Detroit. A former U.S. Poet Laureate, Levine won the Pulitzer Prize, twice the National Book Award, and in 2014, the $100,000 Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement.

Here's one of my favorite of his poems.

SWEETNESS

Sixteen years ago, in the high meadowson the French side of the mountains, a clearApril morning, a warm wind slowingthrough the young grains and grasses, the suntouching everything with yellow light, I calledto my son Teddy, then fifteen, to come see,and he left the car to stand beside me. He spokefirst, in a voice the wind half-swallowed, to saysomething about the sweetness and the airat this height. I had been asking a farmerif he knew was the pass to Adorra open. Yes,of course, on a day like this, and he laughedhis great laugh, a thickly built mansweating in the open wool shirt high aboveme on the tractor seat. I felt my wife's handin mine, squeezing, and turned in time to seeher holding back the tears for a moment beforethey overflowed. Just the three of us, home and farfrom home, a tiny family on so vast a plain,with forty miles to go, yet were there.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Pulitzer-winning novelist Anne Tyler, whose 20th novel, "A Spool of Blue Thread," was published last week by Knopf, was interviewed in the summer of 1992 by the Virginia Quarterly Review. She talks about not relying on inspiration, on what makes a routine and how sleep often solves her writing problems.

Tyler doesn’t wait for an inspiration before she begins writing. She
makes writing a routine, reviewing a bit of her previous day’s work and
then starting again, following the characters through the plots. “It’s
like playing dolls,” she
believes. “Writing is a sort of way of disobeying two major rules I
heard as a child: stop daydreaming and stop staring into space.” To
Tyler, tapping her imagination “is really an extension of day dreaming. I
just sit around thinking “What if?” about things.” The process of
writing for Tyler is one of continual discovery.

Tyler has been writing thoughts and observations on white, unlined
index cards since high school. The cards are eventually filed in a small
metal box; divided by chapter number, the box also has “extra,”
“general,” “look up,” and “revise” sections.

When starting a novel, Tyler reads through her file of cards and
selects ones that bring to mind interesting associations, looking for a
story that will tie them together. As characters emerge and develop in
her imagination, she explores their personalities. Before she begins
writing, she insists on knowing her characters intimately so that she
will understand each person’s reaction to the events that occur. Only
after this preparatory period is over will she be able to outline the
novel, using a single sheet of paper and one or two sentences
per chapter.

While she sleeps, she told an interviewer, “some sort of automatic
pilot works then to solve problems in my plots; I go to bed trustful
that they’ll be taken care of by morning. And toward dawn I often wake
up and notice, as if from a distance, that my mind is still churning out
stories without any help from me at all.”

Tyler frequently suffers from insomnia from two to four in the
morning, a malady she believes she inherited from her family. She says
that half of her family “fights” this condition; the other half gets
something done. Tyler uses those wakeful hours to write on index cards.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Before Charlotte poet Gail Peck could give her first reading for her new chapbook, "Within Two Rooms" (Finishing Line Press), she learned that a full-length poetry manuscript, "The Braided Light," had won the Lena Shull Book Contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Her prize is $250 and a reading in March at Catawba College in Salisbury. Former poet laureate Fred Chappell calls "The Braided Light," about Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, "a poignant envisioning of visions, a look into the heart of light." Main Street Rag will publish this book in March.

Meanwhile, back at the chapbook ranch, Peck will read from "Within Two Rooms" at 2 p.m. Sunday at Park Road Books. Charlotte poet and essayist Rebecca McClanahan calls these poems "a bittersweet litany of praise for the world the mother teaches us to notice, and to love."

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Carolyn Brown's "Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker" (University Press of Mississippi, $20), is a new look at the prize-winning poet and author of "Jubilee," a semi-fictional historical novel based on the author's bi-racial grandmother. In the biography, I learned many things I had not known.

That Walker and husband "Alex" Alexander began their married life in 1943 in High Point, N.C.

That Walker began her teaching career at Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C. in 1940.

That Walker was the first African-American woman selected to attend Yaddo, an artist's retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Also in residence with Walker were Carson McCullers, Langston Hughes and Jean Stafford.

That Walker sued Alex Haley, author of the Pulitzer-winning book, "Roots," for copyright infringement for "significant parallels between her "Jubilee" and Haley's "Roots"...enough to lead her to believe that he had stolen her work." Walker did not win the case, but she considered it "time well spent" for what she learned about copyright infringement.

Dannye Romine Powell

Dannye Romine Powell

About this blog

Dannye Romine Powell has published three collections of poetry (University of Arkansas Press), and a non-fiction book, "Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers" (John Blair). Over her years at the Observer, she's served as book review editor, feature writer, restaurant critic and local news columnist. Count on her for news of Carolinas authors and write her at dpowell@charlotteobserver.com.